Author: Kim Cooper

A secretary, in heels and hose and a neat little updo, catching big game fish? That’s crazy, kids! And yet it happened today off the beach in La Jolla.

Folks spotted a big fish swimming erratically between the two breakwaters, as if it had been injured. The exquisitely-named Mrs. Dymple Axtell, 28-year-old secretary of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, watched for a spell and then couldn’t contain herself. She enlisted Harry Grimm to row her out, and promptly gaffed a 512 pound, 12′ broadbill swordfish. which they pulled back to shore. A San Diego fish market paid them $81.82 each for their share of the fish, which will handily cover any damage to the lady’s coiffure or manicure.

There were two distinguishing features of the man who robbed the Bank of America branch at Seventh and Broadway near closing time today. He had a very dirty face, and he was no gentleman.

Teller Paul V. Glowczewski of 2939 Covina Street told police that the man came to his window, showed a revolver through his Army raincoat’s split pocket, and snarled “Gimme money.” Glowczewski placed some cash on the counter, and Mr. Grubby snapped “Gimme more!” He was right; Glowczewski had been holding out on him.

Then the man took his money and strolled casually out of the bank, leaving one shaken teller and several dozen oblivious customers to finish up their business.

Mark Lima, 16, could hardly dispute mother Estelle’s opinion that he was a lousy student: his latest report card showed failing grades in spelling and in math. But why did she have to harp at him like that, first about school, then about leaving a door open?

Barely thinking, he loaded the .22 rifle his father Alfred, a Tijuana chemist, had given him when he turned 14 and he shot Estelle once in the back. Then, horrified, he called the ambulance to their little home at 412 1/2 W. 68th Street.

Even in her agonies, Estelle, 41, sought to protect her son, “Don’t hurt Mark… he’s a good boy!” Her condition is critical, and Mark is in juvenile custody.

It took police some time to piece it all together, but when they did, they found that familiar tragedy of a man of mature years, the young, troubled model he married, a love that burned but briefly, the child caught between them, and money. Always money.

The tale unraveled when Sam Wartnik, 45, sportswear manufacturer with offices at 1020 Wall Street, had his attorney ask Wartnik’s partner Al Hirschfeld and employee Clifford Jones to drop by the house where his wife and son had been living solo since the he filed for divorce last week. Wartnik, in San Francisco on business, had been unable to get Lena Mae, 30, on the phone, and was concerned she might have done something rash.

This was the gal, after all, who he painted in his divorce suit as a drunk and drug abuser, a person who had once tried and several times threatened to kill him. All the same, he’d left baby Neil Ellis in Lena Mae’s care.

On the door of the little Cape Cod-style house at 4545 Clybourn Avenue they found a note: “Have gone to spend week-end with friends.” They broke in.

Lena Mae was big on notes. Along with the blood splattered in every room they found the one that said “Sam, here are the keys. Now you can sell the home and gloat over your MONEY.”

And the one on the back of Lena Mae’s summons to a custody suit that was to be held this morning. It said “Sam, this summons is my reward for standing by you through thick and thin. Well, this is what you’ve often begged me to do so I’m doing it–and taking my sweet, precious Neil with me. Too bad, cause we both did love life since you left us broke but happy together. We got well together with your beat-up presence away. Good bye…”

And they found Neil, dressed only in a diaper and his own congealed blood, strangled on a bed. He’d been that way for a couple of days. Propped on another bed, a whimsical book for expectant fathers.

The hotel manager found Lena Mae in the Hermosa Biltmore, covered in hesitation cuts, ultimately dead perhaps of poison. And more notes. “Bleeding to death is so slow but I do want my baby buried in my arms.” And in her wallet, beside the season pass to Santa Anita, on the back of a mailing receipt for something sent to her husband at his office on November 10, a day after they separated, “I am Mrs. Sam Wartnik. Notify Los Angeles Police.”

Sam and Lena Mae were married in Las Vegas on May 19, 1946. Baby Neil was born on January 24, and died around December 1.

We thank you. And now, back to your regularly scheduled 1940s.

Police at the 77th Street Station are wrapping up a two-day sweep of neighborhood nogoodniks, having dragged 31 suspected robbers (male) and 8 grand theft person suspects (female) out of bars at 10218 and 10224 Graham Ave. A number of those arrested were armed with knives. No additional details were provided.

Further neighborhood reading:

It was 2 am, but the lights were blazing in Mrs. Helen Cristillo’s home at 4037 Coldwater Canyon. Helen and her sister Mrs. Alma Kelly were in the kitchen, preparing gifts for the Lou Costello Jr. Foundation Benefit Bazaar, when they heard a noise in a guest room and discovered the furniture in disarray. A ladder propped outside the window and the missing screen made it clear that they were dealing with thieves, not poltergeists, and the cops were called.

When houseguests Mr. and Mrs. Louis Failla came home soon after, Mrs. Failla discovered her jewelry box and its contents valued at $3715 was missing. And Helen Cristillo found that her purse, which had contained eight hundred dollar bills and a $7000 pair of diamond and platinum earscrews (a gift from Helen’s proud son, comic Lou, last Christmas), was also missing.

Not a bad haul for a few minutes work, but assuredly the act of someone without any holiday spirit. Phooey!

Hurrah for the telephone!

First, Mrs. L.B. Beddoe, 4587 Date Ave., La Mesa, received a call from daughter Pamela Evans, who said she was going to kill herself. Mama called the LAPD business office and asked if someone could please stop her.

Radio patrolmen J.P. Hooper and T.A. Gibson raced to Pamela’s pad at 104 N. Catalina, where the 19-year-old department store worker was passed out beside an empty pill box. The officers rushed her to Hollywood Receiving Hospital for a stomach pumping. Pamela presently revived, and murmured of the financial woes that had inspired her act.

But happily the phone had still been working, and so the lady lives. Moral: always pay your phone bill first.